


Liberties

by yosparky



Category: Original Work
Genre: Class Differences, Clothing Porn, Hand Jobs, Historical, M/M, Melodrama, Oral Sex, Politics, Resolved Sexual Tension, pre-revolutionary France
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:27:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25150861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yosparky/pseuds/yosparky
Summary: Love was a luxury entirely beyond what Fabrice could afford, and all the more painfully appealing for it.
Relationships: French Nobleman's Ward/Artist Under Same Nobleman's Live-In Patronage
Comments: 14
Kudos: 23
Collections: Rare Male Slash Exchange 2020





	Liberties

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



The dismissal of a second stable-boy in as many weeks after the ward’s arrival seemed a step beyond even the household’s customary chaos. 

Fabrice had been working on the final stages of his latest commission, determined to add some dramatic flourish to the less than inspiring landscape by catching the particular blaze of the day’s setting sun over the distant hayricks. But the rising tumult in the courtyard, although three floors below his open window, was making it even more difficult to concentrate than he usually found it. He felt himself compelled to take an interest.

By the time he had descended and emerged into the open air, he caught only a glimpse of the unfortunate lad, as the stablemaster finished bundling him onto a waiting coach back to his village. As the sound of the horses and wheels died away down the drive and through the estate’s imposing stone gates, Fabrice gave a nod of greeting to the stablemaster, who rolled his eyes.

“His Lordship’s ward, again, stirring things up and dragging others into mischief. Nothing for you to concern yourself with.”

Here in the placid countryside, they were safely distant from the turbulence of Paris, but the ward seemed to consider himself an ambassador of the city’s upheaval. Fabrice knew only what he’d picked up through occasional gossip from the servants: that this boy, Antoine, was the third son of the marquis' sister, not needed for the family line – which was evidently just as well – and almost nineteen but still behaving like an ill-disciplined child. 

Fabrice looked back at the stablemaster, and raised his eyebrows. “This isn't the same one that he got into trouble before?”

“No – that one was caught slipping him one of those mudslinging pamphlets from Paris he was asking for. This lad was just caught slipping him – well. You may imagine.” He cleared his throat disapprovingly and studied the flagstones.

Fabrice obliged them both by not pursuing that particular line of enquiry. “He’s settling in, then? I’ve still not laid eyes on him, you know.”

“Not yet? I wouldn’t be too curious – the ward seems almost more of a libertine than the master. I don’t know what good sense or manners his mother expects him to learn here – more likely she just wants him somewhere out of her hair.”

Out of her hair and directly into someone else’s, Fabrice reflected, as the man went on his way. He couldn’t deny a certain curiosity about the new arrival - not that giving in to curiosity had ever done him any good. At any rate, right now he needed to let his patron know that his commission was going to need another few days. He felt the familiar dread tightening his throat as he made his way back into the _manoir_.

After his second knock received a drawled permission to enter, Fabrice pushed open the heavy oak door. Through the half-drawn velvet curtains the last of the day’s light soaked in, sticky as syrup, spotlighting the swirling dust, the yards of stained and tattered silk and scattered glasses rolled under furniture. The stale air was cut with the sharpness of drink and dried sweat.

His eyes adjusting to the half-light, Fabrice made out the girl tangled in a blanket on the bed in the room’s far corner, her audible breathing sleep-steady and her face half-hidden in the crook of her arm. Under daylight that was all wrong for this night-time vision, her spill of blonde hair and the subtle curves of her bare hips and back were all that he allowed himself to see. 

He had seen enough of this sort brought home, a half-league ride to this estate from one or other of the nearby market-towns, girls and sometimes boys surrendering or abandoned for a few nights before they were dispatched. It was never clear how much of these little displays Fabrice was meant to see, whether newly-acquired possessions would be worth as much with no one there to see them.

His master, in the casual linen gown he habitually wore at home over shirt and breeches, was occupied at his writing-desk, crossly scoring through lines in what looked to be a ledger. At length, he looked lazily up at Fabrice. It may have been a trick of the light, but his countenance looked more sallow, his eyes more deep-set, than they had when Fabrice had captured them in oils, almost a year ago now, for his first commission. 

He set down his pen. “Well – is my landscape done?”

Fabrice looked at the floor. “Yes – yes, almost. I’ll have it ready to present by the end of tomorrow.”

The weight of his patron's gaze on him was almost tangible. “I recall that’s also what you told me yesterday.”

“That’s true, _monsieur_ – my apologies. I simply need to put the finishing touches… It’ll be ready in a week, certainly, if not - ”

His master silenced Fabrice’s protestations with a wave of his hand, and continued sourly: “Well, I hope you’ll find my ward a more inspiring subject than my grounds. I need his portrait done, and more quickly than you usually take about it. He’ll be ready for you in an hour – and don’t let him give you any trouble.”

Fabrice nodded, hoping this was the end of the conversation. From nerves, his eyes were drawn back to the girl on the bed, and the other man followed his gaze.

“Quite something, isn't she? Cost me enough, of course...”

Getting up and crossing the room, his hands closed tight around the girl's wrists, pulling her up and letting the blanket slip to her waist, and then pitching her on her back where she smiled up breathlessly at him. 

“But I'm getting my money's worth, aren’t I?”

Fabrice took this as his cue to leave. He closed the door behind him from a sense of propriety that seemed to mean nothing to anyone in this place other than him.

* * *

Since the death a year earlier of his Lordship's father, his only son had shaken off his last remaining restraints and shouldered the full weight of his inheritance. The marquis, when more amenably than terrifyingly drunk, was fond of telling Fabrice that there was an art to his own life, the art of how fortunes built in years can be squandered in seconds. There were no children of his own, officially, though unofficially there were several, scattered unacknowledged and certainly unsupported around more than one of the outlying villages. While land-taxes, rents and dues continued to roll in, he complained almost daily that in another few years, if the country was held to ransom by shopkeepers, lawyers and clerks, it was doubtful whether there'd be anything left for anyone to inherit.

If he’d had more money to spend - as he was also in the habit of telling Fabrice - he would have found himself a painter whose training, fame and talent were a better match for his ambition, and not an unknown mediocrity still in his twenties and yet to prove himself worthy of his hire. As Fabrice made his way downstairs later that evening, descending the stone staircase to the entrance-hall with the weight of all this heavy on his shoulders, he glanced up at the faces of the family ancestors that lined the walls, seeming to gather thicker dust every day beneath their glass and gilt. They were nothing much to look at, Fabrice thought, despite the silks and velvets they were shrouded in, defined at their prime only by the wealth that plumped out their faces and dulled their eyes.

When he reached the small but ornate sitting-room, he was granted his first sight of Antoine. The ward had had to be virtually dragged downstairs for this consultation, and was sprawled in a pale blue armchair opposite the white marble fireplace, a glass of wine already half-empty in one hand. There was an obvious family resemblance in the dark eyes and the full, generous mouth, but Fabrice was struck by the differences too – the sharpness of his cheekbones and the contrastingly soft skin, as smooth as it might look under glass. Antoine's dark hair lay loose and unpowdered, curling softly on his shoulders. In white breeches, a white shirt and a black gold-figured waistcoat, he was impatiently kicking one heel of his polished black boots against the delicately carved and gilded wood of the chair-leg. 

“So you’re an artist,” he was saying, his voice intense, studying Fabrice with his chin propped on his hand. “How long have you been under my uncle’s patronage? Tell me where you’re from – have you lived in Paris?’ 

Fabrice had no wish to be reminded of the answers to any of these questions, particularly that concerning Paris. He hadn’t been here long, he supposed – certainly not long enough to feel secure in his position – but none of that was any of this boy’s business.

"We should discuss how you wish to be portrayed," he said, attempting to sound businesslike or at least experienced.

“ _Mon dieu_ , don’t be tedious,” Antoine said lightly, and took a quick mouthful of wine. “Sit down at least, don’t just stand there. And tell me, where do you sleep – in the servants’ quarters?”

Although gratefully taking a seat, Fabrice started at this abrupt questioning, and gave Antoine a look that couldn’t hide his affronted confusion. The boy looked back at him coolly, as though he was an idiot. 

“I’m trying to establish your position in the household,” he said. “You’re not a servant, are you? You’re a craftsman, but you’re treated the way servants are – at the beck and call of your master, letting them tell you what to do as if you were a valet. Men like my uncle don’t respect art, you know, just the status it brings them to have their wealth shown off. And that’s only one of the things that’s wrong with the whole set-up – people are starving and yet money pours into the coffers of the king and his friends.”

“I’m – comfortable enough,” Fabrice replied stiffly, aware that the discomfort in his voice hardly proved the truth of this. He could imagine now what dangerous tracts the boy was reading.

“But are you treated well, are you given respect, or equality before the law, or anything that’s due to you as a man?” He drained his glass and put it down, his lower lip sulkily set. “You must know change is coming, whether the parasites living off the country welcome it or not.”

Fabrice gazed helplessly at the parquet flooring, until Antoine laughed, not unkindly, but as though Fabrice was some kind of pet which had failed to perform on command.

“Oh, you’re hopeless. And I’ll leave you to decide what form the portrait will take yourself – this is enough of a bore already.”

He got up in an elegant sweep and left the room, leaving Fabrice with nothing decided and with even less confidence than when he’d entered.

* * *

The portrait Fabrice considered his best work – though still not quite finished after more than a year – lay at the bottom of the battered travelling-trunk beneath his bed. He didn’t need to look at it to be reminded of his first and only love, or of its dismal ending. It was the first portrait he’d attempted to paint in miniature, its intricate lines and jewelled tones an interesting exercise, and it was made to be hidden away in a locket or other clandestine home – as was the emotion that had informed its production. 

With little money and less status, Fabrice hadn’t been at liberty to indulge, or even to express his inclinations, the way that Antoine clearly was with stable-lads, or his uncle was with village-girls and boys. Love was a luxury entirely beyond what Fabrice could afford, and all the more painfully appealing for it.

That Antoine would be only the second person, after his uncle, to have sat for him since those agonising days was enough of a burden, without the boy’s own particular truculence added on top. It had been several days since their first conversation before Antoine had deigned to sit for him. Fabrice had requested an early start to the session, but when he reached the sitting-room as the clock struck seven Antoine looked to have been awake since god knows when, lounging catlike against the armchair’s plush upholstery and clutching an almost emptied bottle of brandy. 

He looked up and gave Fabrice a lazy, brilliant smile, uncoiling himself from the chair’s depths. When he spoke his voice was heavy, drink smudging the words together. He had to repeat himself before it became clear that he was offering Fabrice the last of the bottle in his hand.

“It's been cold all night. You must need it,” he said, holding the bottle out. His eyelids were sleeplessly heavy, looking almost bruised under the black silk of his hair. 

Fabrice lowered his gaze and shook his head. “Thank you – I can't.”

Antoine widened his eyes, looking less offended than intrigued. “Why ever not?”

Fabrice drew a deep breath and ran through the litany of obvious reasons: that it wasn’t his place, that it was far too early to drink, that doing so would amount to theft from the household, then he fell silent and looked up.

“That's why you _shouldn't_ ,” Antoine said, with a twist of his petulant mouth that looked half temptation, half contempt. “It doesn't mean you _can't_ , if you want to.”

It was hardly Fabrice's place to argue, but he shook his head again, and watched as Antoine shrugged one shoulder and leaned back in the chair again, tilting the bottle up to his open mouth. He finished it in a single swallow, staining his lips darker and sparking a rush of colour in his pale cheeks. There was a feverish glitter to the dark of his eyes that made him look like some unearthly creature. 

He looked directly at Fabrice and slowly licked the last of the drink’s traces from his plump lower lip. They both jumped when the door swung abruptly open and crashed against the wall.

His Lordship, a glass in his hand and already looking furious in general, sharpened his anger’s focus as he stared at Fabrice. 

“Have you not started yet? What the hell do I keep you for?”

“He isn’t started, and he won’t be,” Antoine snapped before Fabrice could respond, rapidly pulling himself out of his drink-induced languor. “I’m having no part of this absurd idea.”

“And why not, you little wretch? Do you think it’s your place to defy me?”

Antoine’s face took on the same mutinous fury with which he’d earlier predicted the downfall of the social order, and looked as though he saw no difference between his quarrel with that and with the rules of his own uncle’s house.

“It’s my place to defy all the stupid rules we’re given – and it’s not your place to give orders, to anyone, just because you’re born with – “

His uncle, looking even more enraged, dashed the last of the drink in his glass into the fireplace. Antoine scarcely had time to leap from the chair before the empty glass shattered against the wall above it. His dark eyes flashing, he moved to throw his own empty bottle in return, but his uncle, rapidly crossing the room, closed a hand hard around his wrist, twisting it until he dropped the bottle to the floor with a pained gasp.

“While you’re under my roof you’ll damn well follow my orders,” he hissed. “You’ll behave yourself, you’ll sit for this man, and you’ll do anything else I ask.”

Fabrice, who had found it prudent to back himself against the wall in the middle of this drunken family duel, attempted to retreat even further as his patron swept out of the room. He then turned abruptly in the doorway as though noticing Fabrice for the first time. 

“You – make a damn start once he’s made himself presentable. And make him look less of a waste of space than he is – if you can.”

Fabrice nodded and did his best to slow his breathing as the door slammed shut. Antoine had cast himself back into the armchair, rubbing his wrist and giving an annoyed glance down at his outfit.

“I’m not going to be painted like a fop at court, in silks and satins,” he said sulkily.

Then he got to his feet with a newfound decisiveness, a flash of mischief in his eyes as he looked over at Fabrice. “If you really have to do this, you can paint me in the new style.” 

Fabrice stared at him. “In Classical dress, do you mean?”

“Yes. I’ve no suitable costume, of course – you’ll have to use your imagination.”

* * *

Antoine’s more accommodating mood was still in place that afternoon, when Fabrice set down the primed white canvas on its wooden frame and took up the sticks of charcoal for his preliminary drawing. His relief at this co-operation was tempered by worry over how the marquis might respond to his ward’s caprice. Indulging these whims was clearly, however, the only way that Antoine would agree to take part in the process. 

His hair clubbed with a black ribbon at the nape of his neck, Antoine stripped off his fine clothes with some glee, seeming to delight in his rejection of modesty even as Fabrice averted his eyes. He watched the buckled leather shoes, white breeches and lace-frilled shirt flung in a heap to the floor, and, in his worn painter’s smock over his own clothes, felt anew the humbleness of his position. 

By the time he looked up, Antoine had draped and tied what looked to be a white bedsheet over one shoulder in an attempt at Classical dress. The fabric fell softly over his slender form, lightly but clearly outlining the planes of his chest and hipbones. Fabrice had some idea of what Antoine wanted – he’d seen David’s work exhibited a few years earlier in Paris, and still remembered the sensation it had caused with its departure from the daintiness and softness he’d grown used to as convention. 

“At least you know the style,” Antoine said approvingly, when Fabrice had related this. “It’s all about reducing the subject to essentials – hard and uncompromising, like a statue. Statues are better than portraits, of course – for one thing they’re more democratically available – most statues are a public work of art, not shut up in a private cloister as one man’s possession.”

Unsure quite how to respond to this, Fabrice refrained from rolling his eyes and instead applied himself to sketching, and then in subsequent sessions to building up layers of colour. Antoine, when he lifted his chin in profile and gazed off into the distance as though at a horizon aflame with the birth of a new world, was clearly doing his best to make himself aloof and austere. But he had a warm, sensuous and purely ornamental quality which resisted the cold, stark lines of the style he’d requested. It was a challenge to fit his watercolour softness, and the languid luxury of his looks, into the demeanour of a statesman or a warrior, but Fabrice made the effort, reflecting that he often did his best work when under duress. 

After some further sessions, when he’d made enough of a start to feel comfortable with eyes other than his own on the painting, he beckoned Antoine behind the canvas to take a look. Antoine gazed upon the portrait for an agonising length of time. Then he stepped back and clapped Fabrice upon the shoulder as he breathed a sigh of relief.

“I commend you - it's marvellous. You only need a subject that inspires you rather than bores you to bring out your best, don’t you? You’re no different there to anyone else.”

Having spent so long on trying to capture Antoine’s face, with its particular mix of arrogance, indolence and daring, Fabrice could not profess himself surprised when on the verge of sleep, curled up for warmth under shadow and threadbare sheets, he found his thoughts drifting towards that face once more. Against the canvas of his closed eyelids, he found himself picturing his own hand twining that silky black hair around his fingers and pulling gently, then less gently. He pictured himself looking down at dark eyes raised in dazed supplication, that reddened mouth heavy and yielding like ripe fruit. All the colours were too full, too rich, and he found himself spending too quickly, his lips bitten sharply silent and his nails digging hard into the palm of his free hand. 

* * *

"Give me your opinion?" Fabrice asked shyly a month or so later. "It’s not quite done, but after drying and varnishing… hopefully you can see it will be satisfactory in the end, at least."

His Lordship had yet to give his own opinion, but Antoine was happy enough with the portrait, and Fabrice elated enough to have finished it, for him to accept Antoine’s offer of a stroll around the grounds in the last of the day's sun. On this occasion Fabrice was also happy enough to accept a drink when Antoine offered it from the ever-present bottle in his hand, and before they’d walked too far he could feel it pleasantly warming him and lending a more intense colour to the turning leaves on the trees and the sky's pale blue, as well as a flush to his own cheeks. 

They had walked beyond the close-cropped lawns, past the rough pastures grazed by livestock, and almost to the edge of the hayfields. The past few years – a hot dry summer, then a season of devastating hail and hard frost – had not been kind to the countryside. For a moment they silently watched the estate’s workers toiling to salvage what they could of the harvest.

“It’s a more interesting canvas, at least,” Fabrice said, aware of how the drink had loosened his tongue. “The workers in the fields, I mean – I painted all this for your uncle, but I’d have liked to show not just the landscape, but those who labour to produce its beauty.” 

“Quite right - its beauty and its wealth,” Antoine replied, sounding delighted, like a teacher addressing a much-improved pupil. “I encourage you to do so. You can exhibit them in Paris - I'm sure you'll get there, and get a fine reception when you do.”

Though deeply touched by Antoine's faith in him, Fabrice made no reply. They walked back towards the house and paused outside the stables, taking a seat on the edge of a stone fountain that seemed older than the house itself. Fabrice watched Antoine stretch out on his elbows in the last of the afternoon sun, his face tilted up to its light like a flower.

“Will you be at my uncle’s ball?” he asked, abruptly. “Say you will – I can’t bear the thought of it, but having someone to talk to would help me endure the evening.” 

“Well – I can’t very well avoid it,” Fabrice began. He had always been uncomfortable around these crowds – made so not by their number, but by the confidence and contentedness they all seemed to possess, which only made him feel his difference more keenly. “I’ll be needed to make some sketches of the guests, I imagine.”

Antoine grinned in relief, and finished the last of the bottle. “So you will be there – good. I’ll seek you out, and catch your eye when things become too tedious. You’re not too used to these gatherings, I suppose?”

“No – and I suppose you are, of course.”

Antoine grimaced, and spun the emptied bottle away over the flagstones. “Not by choice. I’m a prisoner of my family’s designs for me, when they think of me at all. Believe me, there are far more useful ways I’d rather be spending my time.”

He spoke cheerfully enough, but Fabrice could see some desperate unhappiness under the dissolute bravado, which he supposed explained much of the boy’s behaviour. 

“I’ll be happy to help you find relief, if I can,” he said quietly.

Then a loose, drunken thought struck him, inspired by the stables’ proximity, and, trying to lighten the conversation, he spoke without thinking. 

“You have seemed to – forgive me – to have found some relief with the stable lads at least, from what I hear.”

Antoine looked askance at him, with only a flash of amazement and with no discomfort at all. 

“ _Mon dieu_ , there are no secrets in this place, are there?” he said, with a slow smile. “Well, that was only the once, if you must know. And it was here, in fact, just behind that very doorway in front of us. Would you like to know what exactly took place? Have you pictured it to yourself, all alone?”

He got to his feet, slightly unsteadily, and extended a hand to Fabrice. "Come – I’ll take you through it. I’ll paint you a picture, so to speak.”

Fabrice opened his mouth to protest, already deeply regretting having brought the matter up, but it was too late to prevent Antoine pulling him to his feet and drawing him, with a brilliant smile, into the shadows of the stable. At the touch of his hand he felt some thrill of drunken disobedience transmitted from Antoine to himself, which did not lessen when Antoine dropped his hand and leaned against the stable wall.

“What can I tell you? It was a day much like today, and he was a boy who was quiet and serious and devoted to his job, but happy enough to be distracted from it. And it was clear enough that I was pushing at an open door – at least as clear as it is with you.”

He stepped closer and ran a hand down the worn fabric of Fabrice’s shirtfront. “Am I mistaken?”

Fabrice’s throat was too dry from nerves to respond, but any reply was rendered redundant when Antoine pressed a hand lightly against the front of his trousers and gave a triumphant smile. 

“I see I’m not wrong. Well – would you like me to get on my knees, _mon cher_ , the way I did for him?”

This time it was easier to respond, although Antoine clearly needed no encouragement. “Yes – please,” he said breathlessly, and watched Antoine drop to his knees before him, his dark eyes wide as he tilted his face up.

“And what now? Would you like me to take out your cock and pleasure you with my hands – with my mouth?”

How could he be so calm? Fabrice could feel his own hands trembling as he let himself settle them in Antoine’s hair. He nodded again, and heard himself give a quiet gasp as Antoine deftly unbuttoned his fall-front.

With Antoine’s soft unworked hands around his length, stroking it to aching hardness with firm, practised twists, Fabrice realised with a start that he could not recall the last time he’d had someone do this for him. The slick heat of Antoine’s plush lips around the head of his cock was almost too much, and he felt his fingers twist more tightly in the warm silk of his hair. 

Pulling back, Antoine looked up at him with all the appearance of innocence, the sweep of his eyelashes dark against his skin. 

“Too much for you, _cheri_? Or not enough – shall I continue, or shall I stop right here?”

“Damn you – yes, more, please,” he said, almost shocked at the volume of his voice and at the sudden commanding edge it displayed beneath his breathlessness. 

Antoine chuckled softly, wickedly, and bowed his head again, applying his tongue to the underside of the cock in his hands in a way that made Fabrice moan aloud and almost shiver. He knew he was unlikely to last long, and tried to commit to memory the feeling of Antoine’s tongue languidly tracing his length, his lips pressing around its tip to slowly and deliberately suck, this glimpse of undeserved and unexpected pleasure that was surely all that he would find himself allowed. 

It was indeed not long before he found the muscles of his thighs tensing and his fingers clenched in the boy’s hair, trying to give him some warning, but Antoine’s mouth remained fast around him while he spent, his own hands holding firm to Fabrice’s hips. He sat back at length, licking his lips, and pulled himself to his feet with a sigh of satisfaction. 

He leaned forward to press a kiss to Fabrice’s mouth, and stroked a soft white hand down the stubble of his roughened cheek. 

“I’m never wrong about these things. You shouldn’t deny yourself the things you want, _cheri_.”

Antoine moved to kiss him again, and Fabrice moved against him, hesitantly, then deeper, until they breathlessly broke apart, the kiss feeling for Fabrice more strangely intimate than having Antoine’s lips around his cock.

Antoine took his hand again and pulled him back towards the brightness of the yard. “Come along – I shouldn’t think I’ll be missed, but you may be.”

“Wait – I – what about yourself – do you need me to…?”

He lacked the words for this sort of thing, as usual, but Antoine smiled and shook his head. 

“Not now – but there’ll be time enough for that, I promise.”

* * *

As the next few weeks and months passed, Fabrice found himself thinking of the word liberty – or rather of the way that Antoine said it. The idea of it obsessed him, of liberty as something at once democratic and freely available, and as something one had to be wealthy enough to afford. The idea of liberty, and the memory of Antoine's lips against his, lingered like the taste of brandy. 

Antoine’s portrait, finally varnished after drying, had not been hung as Fabrice had expected, but had been dispatched by his patron to an unfamiliar address elsewhere in the countryside. Antoine, despite his delight in his finished portrayal, professed himself glad to see the back of it, and Fabrice himself was too preoccupied with Antoine to give the matter too much thought. He did worry, when his uncle cast his dark gaze at Antoine over the rim of his wine-glass, about the trouble they were courting, but the anxiety was never enough to quell his own intoxication.

He hadn’t dreamed their hurried tryst in the stables would be the start of so many more, but Antoine was proving irresistible. Fabrice had had no idea of the number of places there were in the estate for clandestine encounters, but Antoine, lacking any privacy from his uncle in the house itself, seemed to have devoted himself to finding them all. They were coupling with physical discomfort but emotional elation in the handful of barely-visited rooms, suffused with dust and damp, where they could be sure of no discovery other than by the spiders watching from the cobwebbed corners. The autumnal shadows of the trees in the far reaches of the orchard, as well as back in the stables and, once, the hayloft, were places where the pressures of time, space and patience gave them the chance to do no more than kiss desperately against the walls or the floor, plunging their hands under layers of clothing to stroke each other to hurried climax, lost in the heated friction of skin against silk and velvet. 

More infrequently, they were able to take more time in Fabrice’s attic room, with his single chair jammed fast against the door to guard against the unlikely unexpected visitor. Antoine had urged Fabrice to paint him again, in watercolours and pastels and in various stages of dress and undress, stretching himself across Fabrice’s threadbare sheets in the early morning light and posing with the open shamelessness of a Parisian artist’s model, giving Fabrice a coquettish glance over one bare shoulder. They never got far into the process without one or other of them playfully streaking a fingertip’s worth of paint across bare skin, and the linseed oil Fabrice kept for mixing paint was given a new use as Antoine wrapped a slickened hand around his cock, bringing Fabrice to another breathless climax when he’d thought he had nothing more left to give. Occasionally Fabrice had no need of Antoine’s hand and came under his own grasp, encouraged by Antoine’s obscene whispers and praise between scattered kisses to his face and throat.

Fabrice dreamed of making love to Antoine comfortably, indulgently, in more than these wildly snatched moments, and in a bed that wasn’t his own narrow pallet but one of those in the paintings he loved, decked out with damask sheets and hung with pale silk canopies, where they could take their time undressing each other, where he would be at liberty to press his lips to every inch of slowly exposed skin. For now, he surprised himself by what he acquiesced to and his own increasing boldness: taking the lead in laying Antoine on his back or pushing him hard against a wall, or wrapping his lace cravat around his obligingly crossed wrists, or giving in to the long-cherished impulse to wind that hair around his fingers and sharply tug Antoine’s head back to make a deep, demanding conquest of his mouth. 

These glimpses of surrender, he knew, were something Antoine could comfortably allow himself, when all he was seriously risking by discovery was his uncle’s disapproval – something for which he continued to demonstrate his scorn. Fabrice knew he himself was risking far more, not least the loss of the patronage on which he depended on top of inevitable scandal. He told as much of this to Antoine as he felt prudent, explaining that he lacked the protection of Antoine’s wealth and status, but had no indication of how deeply this information was penetrating. On some level he hoped this breaking of the rules would keep Antoine from seeking more open trouble, even if it ran the risk of getting them both into it.

* * *

In late November, preparations for the long-anticipated ball were turning the household upside-down. A coachload of hired musicians had arrived, needing to be fed and found accommodation, and the kitchen was frantic with the number and variety of dishes to be prepared. An hour before the first guests were expected, Fabrice found himself pulled aside by Antoine, whose eyes were sparkling with the usual desire for mischief.

"Don’t tell me you’re wearing that for this evening?" he said, looking Fabrice up and down.

"I’ve nothing better to wear than this," said Fabrice, then, suddenly sick of mincing his words in the face of Antoine’s obliviousness to his situation, added: "More to the point – I’ve nothing _else_ to wear."

Antoine gazed at him for a second, said: “There’s no reason we can’t remedy that,” and dragged him with a grin up the two flights of stairs to his bedroom.

Fabrice’s first look at Antoine’s room did not surprise him that much – the high ceilings and gilded furniture were no different from the rest of the house and showed little of the boy's particular character. He was, however, unprepared for Antoine throwing open the door of his heavy oak armoire and beckoning him forward.

“Take your pick of these – you should have something to wear that makes you look as fine as you are in truth.’

Fabrice was hardly a connoisseur of these things, and could offer few expressions of liking or disapproval when Antoine stripped him of his smock and trousers and pressed a parade of alternatives against him – a full-dress shirt with ruffles of fine white lace, a waistcoat of pale lilac shot through with silver thread - and offered his opinion on what made the most pleasing contrast with his eyes and his skin. The clothes, although fashioned for Antoine's slightly narrower frame, were a not-quite-uncomfortable fit. Fabrice was more discomfited by the unfamiliar luxury of velvet and silk against his skin, and tried to make himself used to the feeling as Antoine wound a white lace cravat around his throat and then dropped to his knees before him, gliding white silk stockings up his calves and guiding his feet into low-heeled shoes with the buckles cut into the shape of gemstones. 

Eventually Antoine, looking delighted with his work, ushered him over to the huge ornate mirror that stood in the corner of the room, and which showed Fabrice a wholly unfamiliar version of himself. He watched his own mouth drop open in astonishment.

Antoine sighed from just behind him, placing a hand on his shoulder: "You look good enough to eat, _cheri_. And you see, too, how clothes are only superficial signifiers of finery?"

He smiled, mocking his own rhetoric for once, and slipped a hand under the deep blue velvet dress-coat he'd chosen for Fabrice, drawing it further open over his shirtfront. "All men are the same underneath."

With both of them framed by the mirror's gilt curlicues and twists, Fabrice watched as Antoine pressed a kiss to the side of his throat, making him shiver. He brushed a hand down Fabrice's gold-embroidered sleeve to twine their fingers together. Then he brought their clasped hands up to his mouth and pressed his lips around the tips of Fabrice's fingers one by one, holding his heated gaze in the glass.

Fabrice turned, spurred on by uncharacteristic impulse, and took Antoine's face in both hands, kissing him breathless before he raised his head to glance around the room. Antoine's canopied bed, with its plush upholstered bedstead and crumpled sheets, was covered in discarded clothes and papers, and in any case the thought of having him on his own bed still felt, absurdly, like a liberty taken too far. Instead, Fabrice guided them both to the room's far wall and pushed Antoine against the writing-table, watching him lean back and brace himself with both elbows on its polished mahogany.

The snow-white breeches he'd been dressed in demanded more effort to undo than Fabrice was used to. By the time he'd mastered the small silk-covered buttons, fearful of tearing or staining them, Antoine was giving him an almost desperate look as he pushed his own breeches roughly down around his thighs, slicked his palm and fingers with his tongue and wrapped a hand around his cock. 

This was hardly the time for anything elaborate, but by now both of them had learned well enough what the other liked, or at least needed, from these hurried moments. Leaning forward over him, Fabrice kissed Antoine again, feeling the boy take a grip on his neck and shoulder for balance as he spread his legs wider apart. He slicked his own hand and wrapped it around both of their cocks, his grasp tight and hot as Antoine bucked his hips and bit his lower lip hard.

"Oh, you know just what I like," he whispered in Fabrice's ear through the loose waves of his hair, and turned his head to place a hard kiss to the side of his throat. "I'll never have enough of this -"

Another deep and heated kiss, and the friction of bared skin, was enough to finish them both. Fabrice leaned against the wall to get his breath back, and let Antoine hastily clean them both up with a silk handkerchief that he then shoved beneath the clothes piled on the bed.

Fabrice had only half done up his unfamiliarly intricate fall-front when there was the sudden tread of heavy footsteps on the stairs, and his Lordship's voice gruffly calling Antoine's name. 

Fabrice looked across in silent horror at Antoine, who was fully-dressed again and only looking maddeningly amused at their predicament. Taking pity after a second, he threw open the door of the armoire again and jerked his head, and there was nothing for it but for Fabrice to push his way inside between the loose racks of satins and silks. He took a hushed but deep breath as the door fell closed and found himself, ridiculously, admiring the workmanship of the wood just before black velvet darkness descended on him. 

"What do you want?" Antoine greeted his uncle with customary petulance and in a voice, Fabrice thought, not nearly loud enough to cover up the thump of his own terrified heartbeat.

"My guests are arriving, and I wondered where the hell you'd got to. I want to ensure you're respectably dressed and that you're going to behave yourself this evening, for once. If you do want to embarrass me, you’re not too old to be disciplined, you know - "

Fabrice heard Antoine scoff and, as usual, begin to answer back, and then his insolent reply was cut off with a sharp intake of breath and the sound of a ringing slap.

"There," his uncle said, his breathing laboured. "And what's more, since you like to think yourself one with the commoners, you’re not too good to be horsewhipped in the middle of the courtyard like a thieving kitchen-maid. Is that what you're after?"

The silence that followed was ended by the sound of the door slamming shut. Fabrice pushed the door to his hiding-place back open without waiting for Antoine's permission. When he emerged the boy was standing stock-still and gazing at the wall, but he turned when Fabrice put a hand on his shoulder and threw himself heavily against his chest, leaving Fabrice to somewhat awkwardly fold his arms around him as he felt Antoine give in to a badly-suppressed sob.

"There's no call for him to treat you this way," he began, somewhat surprised at the pitch of his voice and its protective tone. He raised a cautious hand to the faint bloom of pink on Antoine's cheek where he'd been struck. 

Antoine, however, brushed his hand away and stepped back, straightening his collar and smoothing back his hair.

"No - come, forget the wretched man," he said, his voice back to its usual flippancy. "I'm sure I don't need pity - not when I’ve so much of everything else."

Fabrice opened his mouth to respond, but Antoine cut him off with a raised hand. "Go, please - I'll see you downstairs when I'm looking presentable.”

Reluctant to leave Antoine alone, Fabrice gave him a lingering embrace before he turned to leave.

* * *

As the evening wore on, Fabrice was kept too busy sketching to drink more than an initial glass of wine to calm his nerves. He was entranced despite himself by the music, light and colour that filled the house's lower floor: the guests in formal powdered wigs, ruffled shirts, floor-sweeping skirts and golden brocade, the lamplight lending an almost magical glow to the gilded furniture and the silver-topped canes, the flirtatious glances behind fans and indiscretions whispered over wine-glasses. 

It was after midnight when he realised that he had not seen Antoine for some time. Setting down his materials, Fabrice made a circuit of the room, but found no sign of him. He checked the hectic servants’ quarters, and Antoine’s own room, before making an uncertain exploration of the lesser-used corridors of the house. At the end of one, he found a door slightly ajar, and flattened himself against the wall as he listened to the hushed conversation inside.

There was, he thought, some difference in the marquis' voice, something almost businesslike edging the early-morning ache that was customary at the close of his bacchanals.

“Cash now, as agreed, _s’il te plait_.” 

There was the sound of a large amount of coins changing hands, before an unfamiliar voice spoke in response.

“Well worth the price, I think. He’s even prettier than in that ridiculous portrait you sent.”

“If you say so. You can have him now, if you like – an appetizer before you get him for the main course?”

Through the moment's pause that followed Fabrice held his breath, his heartbeat sounding unbearably loud in the corridor's quiet. 

“I can wait – delayed gratification is better than immediate indulgence, I find. Still, _mon ami_ – your own relative? Even for you, this is rather…”

There was a rush of contemptuous laughter. “His own mother has barely written in months to enquire how he’s doing. And she thinks I can live on the miserable stipend she sends for his upkeep. He’s trouble and she might even be glad to know I’m finding some use for the wastrel.”

“Is that so? Take care you don’t talk me out of the deal.”

“Oh, he’ll give you no trouble if you keep the drink topped up and show him a firm hand from the start. He'll be out of it for hours yet - you can stay the night and take him off with you tomorrow. Just don’t bring him back too soon.”

Seeing the dim light inside the room spill out into the darkened corridor as the door was pushed open, Fabrice took some hurried steps backwards further into shadow, and watched as two figures left the room, their steps looking unsteady with drink. As their shadows vanished around the corner, Fabrice waited as long as he could bear before he slipped into the room, where he found Antoine stretched out on a dust-sheeted chaise-longue, in silver-buckled breeches and shirtsleeves and with his eyes closed. As Fabrice shook his shoulder as insistently as he dared, his eyes blinked open, and he focused blankly on Fabrice with a confused smile.

“I… more drink than usual, I think – I’m sorry – ”

Hardly daring to draw breath himself, Fabrice pressed a finger against his lips and was gratified to see the boy slide resignedly into stupefied silence, his eyes almost closing again. He hitched an arm around his shoulders, pulled him to his feet and slowly led him from the room. 

As he half-dragged, half-supported Antoine in staggering steps through the corridors, Fabrice ventured a nod and a nervous smile at the occasional drunken guest who passed them, and he was struck, with a sudden inspirational thrill, by the realisation that his outfit was currently no different from their own. Quickening his steps as much as he could with Antoine more or less out cold in his arms, he guided them both through the entrance-hall towards the open air.

In the lamplit courtyard a coach had just decanted its two passengers, and the driver had dismounted with the horses’ reins in one hand. Fabrice, hardly daring to let himself think about what he was doing, seized the coachman’s shoulder, and did not allow the man’s surprise to dissipate as he opened the carriage-door and pushed Antoine inside. He turned and fixed the driver with what he hoped was a sufficiently haughty stare. 

“My friend here is the worse for drink – and this is the last place he should be. Be a good fellow and take us on to the nearest town where I can set him down for the night. You can drive back here as soon as you wish – and if you need an inducement, I can pay.”

Seeing the man looking uncertain, and uncomfortably aware that he had nothing to back up his words, Fabrice set one polished shoe on the step up to the carriage and, narrowing his eyes, summoned up the cold, commanding tone that had been used so often to him.

“Didn’t you hear me? What are you waiting for, man, get going!”

That seemed to do it. With a hurried nod and an apologetic " _bien sur, monsieur_ ", the coachman seated himself and urged the horses into a trot down the drive and through the estate’s gates, then down the route that Fabrice remembered taking himself, on foot and dragging his luggage, just over a year earlier. 

Fabrice sat back with a rushed exhalation that blended relief with incipient panic. He took the weight of Antoine’s head on his shoulder, stroking his hair as much to calm his own racing thoughts as to reassure Antoine, as the night closed in outside the carriage-windows.

* * *

It was after dawn by the time Antoine was properly awake. He had no memory, or so he claimed, of the evening just past, and Fabrice himself could barely piece together the succession of steps that had led them to some anonymous lodging-room above a coaching-inn, with enough distance between here and the estate for it to feel safe to stop and draw breath.

He'd given Antoine the room's single bed in which to sleep things off, and now stood at the window, lost in thought and panicked calculation. Their borrowed carriage had returned to the ball with an injunction to its driver to say nothing of his unexpected diversion - Fabrice could only hope the man would keep his word. A _diligence_ would be passing through the town this afternoon on its way to Paris, which would leave enough time to secure a seat through selling whatever possessions he could - his borrowed clothes, surely, would fetch something? Or would they? His worry was offering him question after question, with few answers, and at length he left off thinking and returned to the bed to softly twine his fingers through Antoine's hair.

Antoine, still looking somewhat dazed, was little help. He had a moment of cold-eyed fury as Fabrice recounted his uncle's scheme, and had to be dissuaded from returning immediately to the estate to burn it to the ground. Then shock and anger gave way to an overwhelming relief and a flurry of assurances, mixed with kisses, that he could not adequately thank Fabrice for his rescue.

Fabrice's reply felt like the most difficult words he had spoken in his life.

"You can thank me by keeping out of trouble. I think it's best if you return home - to your mother, I mean. You can explain that - "

Antoine gave way to an equally abrupt fit of laughter, and rolled his eyes to heaven.

"Fabrice! You're _hopeless_. You must know that's the last thing I want." 

He clasped both of Fabrice's hands and looked up, the shine and warmth returning to his dark eyes.

"And is it truly what you want yourself, come to that?”

Fabrice considered what he had to lose by replying truthfully, and found it came to barely anything. 

"No, it isn't. I want - I don't know what I want, in truth, but whatever lies ahead, I know I want you to share it."

Antoine gave him a brilliant smile, and Fabrice took him in his arms again as the world outside the window brightened with the new day.

**Author's Note:**

> Gift written for raremaleslashexchange2020 for aurilly, with thanks for such an amazing letter and prompts! I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> (My apologies for any historical or cultural inaccuracies - I'm sure there are some, but hopefully not too many.)


End file.
